“Who Planted the Seeds of Disaster?” Brought to You in Part by William Ayers and Barack Obama

Obama is twisting and turning over his relationship with unreprentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, trying to pretend it didn’t amount to anything other than a chance acquaintance. But his story becomes ever more preposterous.

First, his spokesman David Axelrod said Obama didn’t know about Ayers’s past when he met him. He also said

There’s no evidence that Obama in any way subscribed to any of Ayers’ views.

Then Obama told Charlie Gibson of ABC News:

‘By the time I met him [Ayers], 10 or 15 years ago, he was a college professor of education at the University of Illinois . . . And the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign, that he is an adviser of mine, that … I’ve ‘palled around with a terrorist’, all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points.’

And on radio this week, he said he met Ayers

‘…on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan’s’ along with ‘a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders…Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated.’

The idea that Obama didn’t know about Ayers’s past is absurd. He would have to have been living on Mars not to know. The Weather Undergound was notorious and received huge publicity in the media. As an Investors’ Business Daily editorialobserves:

Obama claims he had no idea about his terrorist past when he met him, and hasn’t talked to him since 2005. But with the association going back to the 1980s and Ayers making no secret of his radical views, this is hard to believe. Given glowing profiles of Ayers and his past in the Chicago Tribune, as writer Jonah Goldberg found, and Ayers’ radical agenda in education and philanthropy while Obama and Ayers served on charitable projects, it’s hard to imagine anything but a deep bond. The reality is, either Obama is naive or he doesn’t care that Ayers remains an anti-American radical who would hurt his country.

Despite the ‘bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders’ on the Annenberg Challenge, which ran the school reform project, the Annenberg Challenge was Ayers’s baby. It actually diverted funds that were naively assumed to be going to bona fide education projects and channelled them instead into one radical group after another. That is the key point about the relationship with Ayers – that Obama’s own actions as a member of the Annenberg board were in concert with Ayers’ subversive world-view. Indeed, even more explosive new evidence is emerging about Obama’s links with the New Party, a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left by ‘burrowing from within’.

As for his not having been ‘palling around’ with Ayers, Obama makes no mention of the fact that in 1995 his political career was actually launched in Ayers’s home, when he was introduced to fashionable left-wingers by retiring Illinois senator and Communist Party fellow-traveller Alice Palmer as her chosen successor.

And as for not subscribing to any of Ayers’s views, as Andrew McCarthy points out here Obama purred over Ayers’s 1997 polemic on the criminal-justice system, A Kind and Just Parent:

As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers’s book is a radical indictment of American society: We, not the criminals, are responsible for the violent crime that plagues our cities; even the most vicious juvenile offenders should not be tried as adults; prisons should eventually be replaced by home detention; American justice is comparable to South Africa under Apartheid. Obama’s reaction? He described the book as ‘a searing and timely account’ — a take even the Times concedes was a ‘rave review.’

Furthermore, the word ‘ultimately’ raises yet more questions. Assume for the moment that Obama really was somehow ignorant of Ayers’s past. When precisely did he ‘ultimately’ discover the truth? And when he ‘ultimately’ did so, is it really likely that an aspiring politician who was astounded and horrified at the real character of the man with whom he had forged professional links, whose boards he had sat on, whose writing he had extolled and who had helped launch his political career, would have merely assumed that such a man had been rehabilitated? Would he not have immediately read up the press cuttings about him? Is it likely that he would have missed Ayers’s notorious statement in 2001:

I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough?

A final unsettling thought from the IBD, which also points out Ayers’ close relationship with the Venezuelan terror-supporting president Hugo Chavez:

His ties to the rising radicalism in Latin America continue. Could anything be more useful to Chavez than to have someone like Ayers as a go-between with a U.S. president? Obama still has repudiated only Ayers’ past terrorist actions. What about his present?

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